Docker 0.9, Vagrant 1.5 and Xen 4.4 – Virtually Snippets

Docker 0.9 unloads: Docker bumps its version number to Docker 0.9 and as it approaches version 1.0 makes a big change. Docker’s been pretty tightly tied to Linux Containers (LXC) technology to run applications packaged with it but in 0.9 there’s now execution drivers so the option to plug in any one of a range of isolation systems is now available. “OpenVZ, systemd-nspawn, libvirt-lxc, libvirt-sandbox, qemu/kvm, BSD Jails, Solaris Zones, and even good old chroot” are on Docker’s planned list with more to come from various projects. There’s also a new libcontainer which lets Docker plug straight into the Linux kernel to control things – this Go library is likely to see a lot of use outside of Docker too as it wraps up container configuration into a neat JSON specified bundle. Next stop for Docker is a production quality 0.10 which will serve as a release candidate for 1.0. Its lively down at the docks.

Vagrant 1.5 roams out: The developer environment manager Vagrant has been updated too. The new Vagrant 1.5 has added a sharing system to make collaboration easier, versioning for boxes, rsync and smb sync’d folders and Hyper-V support. Simpler SSH authentircation setup, a reworked plugin manager and support for Funtoo, NetBSD and TinyCore Linux as guests wrap out the wedge of features in this release. Alongside the release is the announcement of Vagrant Cloud, a hosted box sharing service built to use Vagrant 1.5’s sharing functions.

Xen 4.4 meditates: Meanwhile, the other Linux virtualisation platform, Xen, has made the first release on its aspirational six month cycle (taking 8 months in this case). The announcement for Xen 4.4 highlights an improved libvirt/libxl interface for better integration with VM managers or cloud platforms, a more flexible event channel interface allowing for over tens of thousands of guests and a rapidly maturing ARM port now with a stable ABI going forwards. There’s also a ‘tech preview’ of nested virtualisation on Intel.